Researching kids and computer games : games, game play and literacy in the twenty first century

Videogames, and young people's engagement with them, are of growing interest to education. This paper reports on initial find ings from the study: Literacy in the Digital World of the Twenty First Century: Leaming from computer games, focussing on the opportunities offered by studying young people's immersion in game play for understanding more about contemporary forms of  engagement and textuality, new forms of literacy,community and identity multimodality, and the implications of such forms and changes for contemporary literacy and English education. Taking videogames as examples of global, ICT-based popular culture, where meaning is built from muhimodal elements, and where young players have to he actively teaming and involved in order to play, the project asks how English and literacy education might benefit from examining videogames, as rich exemplars of contemporary digital culture, and the ways in which young people make use of them, to improve the teaching of print and multi modal forms of literacy.